The choice is becoming increasingly clear. Stark would be an even better word for it.

Voters can choose between –

Keeping the Republic set up in 1787 and prospering now as never before under the leadership of President Trump, by voting for his Republican followers.

Or changing into the North American Venezuela by voting for the other major political party forming rapidly to replace the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, under the leadership of an old communist, Bernie Sanders, and a young communist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The North American Venezuela. It is a vision hovering in the spacious skies over the purple mountains and the fruited plain.

A week ago, Maine Democrat Zak Ringelstein wasn’t quite ready to consider himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, even if he appreciated the organization’s values and endorsement in his bid to become a U.S. senator.

Three days later, he told The Associated Press it was time to join up. He’s now the only major-party Senate candidate in the nation to be a dues-paying democratic socialist.

Ringelstein’s leap is the latest evidence of a nationwide surge in the strength and popularity of an organization that, until recently, operated on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank. As Donald Trump’s presidency stretches into its second year, democratic socialism has become a significant force in Democratic politics. Its rise comes as Democrats debate whether moving too far left will turn off voters.

“I stand with the democratic socialists, and I have decided to become a dues-paying member,” Ringelstein told AP. “It’s time to do what’s right, even if it’s not easy.”

There are 42 people running for offices at the federal, state and local levels this year with the formal endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization says. They span 20 states, including Florida, Hawaii, Kansas and Michigan.

The most ambitious Democrats in Washington have been reluctant to embrace the label, even as they embrace the policies defining modern-day democratic socialism: Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and the abolition of the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congress’s only self-identified democratic socialist, campaigned Friday with the movement’s newest star, New York City congressional candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former bartender who defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats last month.

Two-head Communism

Her victory fed a flame that was already beginning to burn brighter. The DSA’s paid membership has hovered around 6,000 in the years before Trump’s election, said Allie Cohn, a member of the group’s national political team. Last week, its paid membership hit 45,000 nationwide.

There is little distinction made between the terms “democratic socialism” and “socialism” in the group’s literature. While Ringelstein and other DSA-backed candidates promote a “big-tent” philosophy, the group’s constitution describes its members as socialists who “reject an economic order based on private profit” and “share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships”.

Note that, voters. Even private relationships will be monitored by the planners of the social order. It completes the totalitarian vision.

Members during public meetings often refer to each other as “comrades”,wear clothing featuring socialist symbols like the rose and promote authors such as Karl Marx.

Four-head Communism

The common association with the failed Soviet Union has made it difficult for sympathetic liberals to explain their connection.

“I don’t like the term socialist, because people do associate that with bad things in history,” said Kansas congressional candidate James Thompson, who is endorsed by the DSAand campaigned alongside Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but is not a dues-paying democratic socialist. “There’s definitely a lot of their policies that closely align with mine.”

Thompson, an Army veteran turned civil rights attorney, is running again after narrowly losing a special election last year to fill the seat vacated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Even in deep-red Kansas, he embraces policies like “Medicare for all” and is openly critical of capitalism.

In Hawaii, 29-year-old state Rep. Kaniela Ing isn’t shy about promoting his status as a democratic socialist in his bid for Congress. He said he was encouraged to run for higher office by the same activist who recruited Ocasio-Cortez.

“We figured just lean in hard,” Ing told the AP of the democratic socialist label. He acknowledged some baby boomers may be scared away, but said the policies democratic socialists promote — like free health care and economic equality — aren’t extreme.

Republicans, meanwhile, are encouraged by the rise of democratic socialism — for a far different reason. They have seized on what they view as a leftward lurch by Democrats they predict will alienate voters this fall and in the 2020 presidential race.

The Republican National Committee eagerly notes that Sanders’ plan to provide free government-sponsored health care for all Americans had no co-sponsors in 2013. Today, more than one-third of Senate Democrats and two-thirds of House Democrats have signed onto the proposal, which by one estimate could cost taxpayers as much as $32 trillion.

The co-sponsors include some 2020 presidential prospects, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

Those senators aren’t calling themselves democratic socialists but also not disassociating themselves from the movement’s priorities.

Most support the push to abolish ICE [the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] which enforces immigration laws …

… and want to abolish national borders.

So not even a North American Venezuela?

No nations, no nation-states. No national governments, no voting, no political parties, no law to enforce.

The hovering vision fades.

If the comrades have their way, the reality will be even worse than Venezuela.

The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.

The newest star of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, launched her New York congressional campaign by declaring “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” — a jarring embrace of her distinction as a 28-year-old Latina less than a year removed from a job tending bar.

Her campaign slogan: “It’s time for one of us.”

That appeal to the tribal identities of class, age, gender and ethnicity turned out to be a good gamble, steering her to the nomination in a year when Democratic voters are increasingly embracing diversity as a way to realize the change they seek in the country.

“Diversity” meaning, as usual when used by Leftists: women, blacks, Hispanics, and (preferably black and female) persons who declare “non-normative” sexual preferences. Which is to say, anyone except a white male. Even a gay white male being not very welcome.

Given an option, Democratic voters have been picking women, racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians in races around the country at historic rates, often at the expense of the white male candidates who in past years typified the party’s offerings. …

The divide is more stark than any other so far in the primary season, and it reflects the party’s growing dependence on female and minority voters. …

The tribal trend has implications for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, where an historic number of nonwhite and female candidates are considering launching campaigns, including Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). …

At a rally in Nevada over the weekend, [the blonde blue-eyed Cherokee] Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another potential 2020 Democratic contender who never fails to mention her own hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, got cheers when she let slip that she wanted to see a woman occupy “that really nice, oval-shaped room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”. …

This proved the case again in New York on Tuesday, when ­Ocasio-Cortez toppled [Joe] Crowley, one of the most powerful Democrats in the nation and one widely seen as heir apparent to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. …

Through the end of June, 151 women have won House Democratic primaries, nearly doubling the 81 female nominees at the same point in the 2016 cycle, according to data collected by the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Republican nominations of women rose much more slowly, to 32 in 2018 from 27 in 2016.

Unlike tribal Democrats who organize themselves into semi-fixed identity groups, the conservative GOP conserves the classical intellectual ideals built into the U.S. Constitution, and which aspires to help all people compromise on their voluntary political differences, regardless of color, sex, creed or tribe. According to the libertarian Mises Institute:

“Classical liberalism” is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism …

[Recent US-style] social liberalism deviates fundamentally … it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. …

The progressive, elite-socialist ideology of “diversity” uses government to impose variety on settled, coherent communities with the goal of fragmenting political resistance to progressives’ centralized power. …

U.S. conservatives oppose the centralized variety of “diversity” and the grass-roots variety of semi-fixed tribalism.

Conservatives instead favor a small-government ideal which allows a shifting mix of personal freedoms and voluntary affiliations. They expect people — regardless of race, class, sex or birthplace — to organize themselves and their ideas to meet their own needs …

What the Democrats’ policy of “diversity” has come to mean in practice is choosing women “of color” as candidates.

In Europe, where there are fewer women “of color” to choose, white women seem to be preferred to white men. Whether such a policy has been articulated or not, women occupy a great many seats of government, and feminists almost all of them. The Swedish cabinet – fully half of it female – calls itself a “feminist government”. As Western Europe under such governance declines – the female Chancellor of Germany having insisted on swamping the continent with immigrants from the Muslim countries of the Levant, North Africa, and the Middle and Far East – popular nationalist movements are arising and strengthening, and Italy recently elected a nationalist government (a coalition of two popular nationalist parties led by white males) which is taking active steps to stem the tide of the Muslim invasion. And Austria now has a white male Chancellor who in principle opposes more Muslim immigration into his country.

In fairness, and against our prejudice, we must admit that some of the popular nationalist movements (dubbed “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” by the globalist progressives) are also led, and ably, by women – notably Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party in France, Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Anne Marie Waters of the new For Britain party. But they rose on their merits, not because they are women. And that applies also to the excellent women in President Trump’s cabinet.

The thing is, if people are not chosen for a job because of their proven ability to do it well, but for irrelevant and ridiculous reasons such as their color, sex, or sexual behavior, the results will not be good. It’s obvious, but the Left studiously overlooks it. Of course the best person for a job might be female, black, Hispanic, homosexual, transgender, but any such state of being is incidental and cannot in itself be a qualification.

The supreme qualification for power in the US, and ideally everywhere, is the understanding that only the nation-state can protect the freedom of all, equally under the rule of law; that the nation-state must have well-guarded borders to survive; that small unobtrusive government is the only good government; and that only free market capitalism can produce general prosperity.

And those ideas, well proved to be good, were taught to us by – cry! Democrats, social democrats, socialists, communists, feminists – white men.